Setting up the PC

Installing the card into your system will be a pretty easy job. Just slide the card into a free PCIe slot, connect one 6-pin connector to the card. I do recommend you to just buy a decent stable PSU with some reserves, always.

Once the card is installed, we start up windows. We installed our driver, rebooted and that was it. The card will work straight out of the box. Just the way we like it.

Power consumption

It's time to do some actual testing with these card. We'll start off by showing you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view.

A fairly standard power supply will be more than sufficient for this graphics card. Any 450 Watt PSU and above will suffice. We test a lot of PSUs, check out some good ones over here.

The thermal envelope

Our Rivatuner application is a great one. We used it to monitor monitor heat levels from the GPU.

Temperature in degrees C

Idle

Peak

GPU-1

48

60

We measured on a relatively warm day. I expect room temperature to have been 23-24 degrees C when we measured.

Idle temps are roughly 48 Degrees C, yet when the GPU was fully utilized & stressed it also reached 60 Degrees C quite quickly. I'll have to be honest here; the thermals for this product are well within defined baseline.

Meaning the product can take it fine, the downside, that heat is dumped inside your PC. You'll still need good cooling inside the PC to push that heat outwards. We made sure this PC had airflow, so should you.

Volume Levels

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, that heat usually needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try-out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective, you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS

Jet takeoff (200 feet)

120 dBA

Construction Site

110 dBA

Intolerable

Shout (5 feet)

100 dBA

Heavy truck (50 feet)

90 dBA

Very noisy

Urban street

80 dBA

Automobile interior

70 dBA

Noisy

Normal conversation (3 feet)

60 dBA

Office, classroom

50 dBA

Moderate

Living room

40 dBA

Bedroom at night

30 dBA

Quiet

Broadcast studio

20 dBA

Rustling leaves

10 dBA

Barely audible

Well we can skip this part, the completely passive design results into a soundless experience. However since the heat is dumped inside the PC (a lot of it) you'll need an intake and exhaust fan inside your PC, so you'll likely still end up at 40 DBa.

Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT Passive review I had a peek around for an exotic model GeForce 9600 GT. I ended up with Sparkle .. get this .. 99 EUR for their passively cooled product with 512MB GDDR3 memory. I'm sorry but that's just a heck of a lot more value than the 9500 GT will offer gaming performance wise. And next to that, as this review will show .. the product has a few surprises ready under it's sleeves.

Sparkle GeForce 8800GT Cool-Pipe3 512MB reviewSparkle recently released a GeForce 8800 GT that actually is passively cooled. Because the reference cooled 8800 GT already runs insanely hot to 90 degrees C, doing the cooling part passive .. would definitely make things even worse. Combine that with the rumored GPU core temperatures of 110 Degrees C I pretty much stereotyped the product even before we had tested it.

Sparkle Calibre P880LV GeForce 8800 320MBMuch like other companies out there with a special edition card, the Calibre series is slightly more expensive yet you'll receive some pretty nifty extra candy. In the case of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB they are offering your an overclocked model armed with nothing less than a peltier cooler.